Direct Competitors and Related Products

Expert reviews and ratings

The Dell XPS 8700 Special Edition tries to provide you with lots of performance power, some added connectivity features, but it doesn't leave much room for future expansion or a second graphics card. It delivers in the performance category, but it's...

While a bit spendy for what it delivers, the XPS 8700 Special Edition hits all of the right notes for a 2013 power tower: solid graphics, speedy processing, and mSATA storage acceleration with room to grow....

HP’s Envy, on the other hand, costs $200 less and comes with a 256GB SSD (HP also offers more configuration options, although you can’t upgrade to a better video card). Neither machine is a gaming powerhouse, but both provide good price/performance ratios and reasonable headroom for down-the-road upgrades.

Dell packages this one with an Nvidia video card with 1GB of dedicated graphics memory, which isn't quite as much as my top pick, but the advantages of this one certainly even out. If you don't plan on playing a lot of PC games, then this is probably going to be a better choice for you, depending on what you need from your system.

So if you don’t want, say the dedicated sound card or so much RAM, you may want to look for a machine that’s more configurable. We’d certainly be happy to trade half of this system’s RAM and the dedicated sound card for a 256GB solid-state drive instead.

Aside from its mostly unnecessary abundance of RAM, the XPS 8700 Special Edition is a well-rounded performance desktop that's a good fit as a family PC or a dorm-room power tower. It's powerful enough to handle pretty much any task that you throw at...